Luna’s boyfriend Johnny had died on the table. That is what they called it. The phrase was clinical but also gastric. It was medical, yet culinary. And she found herself using it often when people asked about him, about what happened after the heart arrived from some mysterious somewhere, wrapped like a sandwich and stored inside a white and blue Igloo cooler.
They’d just been playing their third hand of Gin Rummy and were considering lunch (soup? ravioli?) when the pager went off. They had given this pager to him for just this moment. “Never leave a room without it,” they had said. It was to be a “like a part of him” so he clipped it to his pocket every morning and set it on the bedside table every night. It was the magic heart buzzer, there to announce the arrival of a human heart, flown in like a baby in the mouth of a stork.
That morning, she had been thinking Johnny looks a little grey as she dealt the cards for the third hand of Gin after breakfast. Grey being the color of cast-off sweaters and kitchen counters in modern houses, where they call it “slate” instead of grey. If someone asked her how he looked that morning (which they were always doing: his mother, his four aunts, his sister in Atlanta; “How is he, be honest!” they’d demand. “Describe him!”), she could have said “slate” and been quite accurate. And when they asked what that meant, she could have said that she meant a particular and specific hue of grey. Which she could imagine them all agreeing was not a good color.
“Gin,” she’d said.
“Cheater,” he’d replied.
“True,” she had replied to his reply. “I was getting hungry.”
“You could have just said ‘I’m getting hungry,’” he said.
She got up from the chair to make some sandwiches when there it was. The buzzing pager sound. They both turned to look at it in total surprise, like an alien had begun to sing beside them.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“Get out the instructions,” he said.
“Where are they?” she asked.
“Wherever you put them,” he said.
It looked right then like they were about to have a colossal fight about the instructions and Luna’s issues with organization, but at that moment the nurse rapped loudly on the door, saying. “Mr. Van Louden? Johnny?”
Luna opened the door and there was the nurse and an attendant, with a wheelchair.
“Hop on in here, Johnny,” the nurse, Delilah Edwards, said. She probably loved this part of her job. Singsongy: “It’s hee-yure…”
“I haven’t hopped anywhere in a long time,” he had said, jokingly. He looked excited, or as excited as a slate-colored man could be, yet there was something else, a small purple aura of fear that hovered around greyish him. Luna fund herself admiring it, the color. It was lilac verging on fuchsia.
Luna had synesthesia, a condition that, in her case, painted the world mostly in hues of purple. And Johnny Van Louden, her boyfriend of three years, who was in end-stage cardiac failure and living with her at the Transplant Village of the Mayo Clinic, was purpling at that very moment. But that was really a side issue. The important thing was that the heart had arrived. The human heart. She had found the instruction pamphlet and tucked it in Johnny’s pocket as they wheeled him away.
“Are you coming?” he called out, over his shoulder.
“Right behind you,” Luna called back, “just getting a sweater.”
“This is Phoenix,” he said. “You don’t need a sweater.”
“True,” she said. The pair had moved to Phoenix from Flagstaff, a city that was considerably colder, and Luna had never really adapted, mentally. She grabbed the sweater anyway, for comfort, like a security blanket.
Locking the door behind her, she caught up with the procession. Johnny, the nurse, and the attendant, a sallow Asian man with a wobbly gait, pushing Johnny in the wheelchair. All of them followed by her, like a strangely important parade, moving, single file, into the hospital.
It was dawn, a time of day they never missed, she and Johnny, as he often couldn’t sleep and they both were fans of the edge of light that would outline the palms over the hospital grounds with fuchsia light. It was beautiful, but also, for Luna, a little tacky looking, like a teenager’s first attempt at eye shadow. Yet there was something about dawn there, the sliver of color, the smell of night receding, the petrichor of dew drop, teensy droplets of moisture beading the cars in the parking lot. Sometimes it even rained lightly just before dawn, which people in Phoenix got really excited about. There was the sound of a distant highway, humming with commuters already heading to jobs at golf courses and restaurants and light industry.
Dawn was all about rituals and normalcy and smelled of the earth sighing and the nearly warm scent of the sun pressing forward and freshly brewed coffee in one of the other Transplant Houses they passed by on their way to meet Johnny’s heart. The heart which had been someone else’s heart and soon would be nobody’s heart, as Johnny would, six hours later, die on the table.
It was the strangest of phrases, used to describe those times when a transplant patient never got back up again to enjoy the new heart that had been brought to them in such a rush and sewn into their body with such care and medical finesse. Dawn was all about normal, but that particular dawn had turned out not to be.
Luna gave Johnny’s hand a squeeze and he gave her a wink when they rolled him away, for that pre-surgery whatever they do. Painting his chest that orangey color with mercurochrome, introducing him to the anesthesiologist, greeting the surgeon. All those people would see him after she did, which didn’t seem fair, really.
~
“He died on the table,” she told her best friend Sue in Binghamton, her cousin Dale in Rochester, Johnny’s online chess partner Marty in Topeka, his entire family (in a conference call), and some random woman who called later that evening. A woman she had never heard of before. Rivers? Was her named actually Rivers? Was she plural? Was she named for two or more rivers?
“Hello? This is Rivers. I am calling to find out about Johnny? Is he there? Can I speak to him?”
“I am so sorry,” said Luna. “He didn’t make it through. He died on the table.”
Then the woman who was more than one river burst into a panicked liquidy response.
“What?” she blurted through an onslaught of tears. “Are you saying he died? Why don’t
you just say ‘he died? What’s with this table shit?”
“Okay,” Luna said. “He died. I am so sorry.”
The woman cried audibly on the line for another moment and then without another word, hung up. By this time it was night and Luna was back in the Transplant House where the remains of their Gin Rummy game was still laid out on the table alongside a half-finished glass of Diet Coke. which was weeping with condensation and which slipped out of her hand when she lifted it to put it in the dishwasher. It shattered all over the floor. Tiny slivers and broken shards and middle-sized slices of glass, everywhere. All the way into the hallway.
The next morning, Delilah Edwards stopped by to discuss “arrangements” with Luna. She brought her a neat bouquet of melba-hued roses. “Knock knock,” she said, though the open window.
Luna was already packing, as the Transplant Village was for people awaiting transplants only, the rules were strict, and she had to leave immediately. The “village” was a solemn little affair of small, manufactured houses whose the inhabitants moved very slowly, like people under water. Her memories of the place would always be transient. She would recall that reduced speed of the occupants, all of them set at a slower rpm.
Once, she and Johnny had burned a frozen pizza in the little oven. Once, a scorpion had gotten inside and was hiding in her shoe. “Close call,” she’d said, shaking it onto the patio.
“His remains can be picked up here,” Delilah said, handing Luna a pamphlet for a local mortuary. This was probably the part of her job she hated. Luna noticed a scrim of sweat out on her upper lip.
“Thank you,” she replied, taking the pamphlet slowly. It was sort of like being handed a menu in a restaurant, she briefly thought. Only there was only one item on the menu, and that was Johnny.
Driving away from Mayo, later that day, she glanced in the rearview mirror. So that was what hope looked like. A little cluster of pale prefab houses alongside a hospital where she had hastily swept up a broken glass the night before. Hope was light green, the color grass wants to be but isn’t in Phoenix, even with all the sprinklers. Hope sprouted sprinkler rainbows but rarely actual rainbows.
She would never find out who Rivers was, or were, or whatever. She would never really find out why Johnny and the heart had not met up the way they had all thought they would, like a person adopting a new pet, happily, but with some clear period of adjustment ahead. She thought she might have accidentally left a few items of clothing in the dryer, but whatever. She should have thought of that on the way out. They were his clothes anyway, so now they were officially nobody’s. Then she thought about the card game. How she had glanced at his both hand and hers before she tidied up one last time.
“Gin,” she said, to herself, and to the nobody beside her, imagining his wispy hair, that one snaggle tooth. That was how you remember people in the end. By their smallest details.
“You win,” he said.
